New Norms and the Body: On Sharing Lifts and Virtual Worlds
As lockdowns around the globe are beginning to ease, many are asking what the ‘new normal’ will look like. Views vary, but what they all have in common is that the old normal cannot coexist with the new world. In this piece, I look at how norms across societies are both experienced by and inscribed on the body. I suggest that to understand the new normal, we must pay attention to how norms are embodied in this time of flux.
When walking into a lift, we express embodied social norms around how close we should be to the others in this space. The resulting proxemic arrangement is usually achieved through a blind following of “rules” that our bodies obey without us noticing, unless someone is breaking these rules. New social distancing measures force us to confront embodied societal norms and allow us to question their cause.
Theories of embodiment look to bridge ideas from phenomenology and post-structuralism to understand how norms are simultaneously constructed at the level of individual habit formation as well as how the body itself is produced by norms. Such embodied norms are generally passively constructed and maintained, and we usually only become aware of such habits when they fail. As we are all forced to work in new ways, to even exist in new ways, we experience a gap between the structures that impose norms onto our bodies and how they are experienced.
“All Watched Over by Icons of Loving Grace”
Such “rules” are also experienced online and the field of virtual proxemics helps us understand how norms around space and non-verbal communication play out in virtual places. One researcher, Nick Yee, described how theories of social presence from the actual world are also seen to exist in virtual worlds, such as in Second Life, with social norms around gender, interpersonal distance and eye gaze transferring into these digital places.
At Stripe Partners we’ve been discussing the proxemics experienced when we’ve been using Google products such as Docs and Slides. We’ve reflected on the anxiety of being ‘too close’ to colleagues on slides they were in the middle of working on. Icons representing colleagues made people feel like they were being ‘watched over’ like someone hovering behind your desk.
Conversely, these features let us feel like we were in a shared space. Seeing each other’s icons promoted a sense of togetherness even when we are apart. These examples show how embodied norms leak across physical and digital boundaries, something we can expect to see more of as collaborative work becomes increasingly remote and synchronous.
Liminality and Plasticity
Besides this virtual feedback of norms into our everyday practices, the coronavirus also provides an opportunity to reflect on the forces that shape normality. The pandemic can be seen as a liminal event, one that the whole globe is taking part in. The French ethnographer Arnold van Gennep described the three phases of ritual or ceremonial events as separation, liminality and aggregation. The social and physical separation that gives rise to the liminal phase we are currently in, provides us with the time and space to think about our daily practices, how we experience norms and what forces shape them.
A liminal period is also a plastic period, one in which transformation is made possible. We can intentionally reconfigure new norms by reflecting on the hierarchies of power that exist in society and the social constructs that shape our lives. Indeed as the anthropologist Bjørn Thomassen wrote, “liminality opens the door to a world of contingency where events and meanings — indeed ‘reality’ itself — can be moulded and carried in different directions”.
Time for Change
If liminality has the potential for change, both social and personal, that change emerges when we reflect on what we have separated from, what we can no longer take for granted and the nature of the disruptions we’re experiencing.
I have been paying attention to how I experience routines and other schedules of the modern world through the body. I have found the Greek notion of opportune moments, kairos, useful. It offers a counterpoint to the linear concept of chronological time that we use to organize our lives. Perhaps there are new ways of imagining and embodying time that might come out of this quarantine?
With only 9% of Britons hoping for a return to normal, especially when it comes to air pollution, there is certainly willingness for change after lockdown, and as we have seen during the pandemic, when pushed to innovate both individuals and organisations adapt remarkably quickly and creatively to such challenges. What aggregation looks like coming out of lockdown will arise from our collective attention on how norms are produced by and are a product of our bodies, and the action to demand a different future.
// Will Buckley
